Okay - this is insane. This and other "patents" recently make me think that the they're almost trying on purpose to destroy the legitimacy of the patent process...
Trying desperately not to sound like a paranoid ninny, what is the possible reason to allow insane patent actions like this to proceed? What are possible side-effects, proceedural, legal, whatever, when the government allow idiots to patent air?
I just spoke to someone who schools there - they've gotten a bunch of new hardware from Cisco and HP over the weekend and they've supposed to be running nearly twice as fast as before. All of the old junk's been replaced with new SOTA-ware.
Everything seems to have been a grant too! Who needs insurance??!
But I do believe that there is a way to boycott the Entertainment Cartel - it's not the optimal way, but I think it would work:
You can't kill their product because we want their product, but they don't want us to consume - they want a feeding frenzy. they want people around the block, or waiting in the cold in Norway for a month before the opening. They want you act without thinking...unorganized and unprepared, we're there's no resistance.
Don't kill the movies or the machine, kill the PR frenzy.
Here's my suggestion - when the latest and greatest flick comes out, don't go see it for the first week or two. Stay home. See it in the theatres, by all means, but not in the first 2 weeks.
The reason is so the opening weekend grosses don't become the marketing muscle Hollywood needs to drive our mass frenzy.
Instead of 110 Million, what would happen if SpiderMan opened to a 50 million dollar 3-day weekend.
Go in the third week, have fun. But by then the frenzy never comes.
We would need to organize, pick a movie from a studio for a good reason (they're active on some legal front) and then not see it for a few weeks.
Heck - most movies are formulaic crap (like Wild Wild West) so by the 3rd week we'd all know whether it's worth going or not.
I wouldn't go after something like the Two Towers - I'm not sure if you agree with me, but New Line seems to have been quite fair to not rape the marketplace to squeeze out every last penny. I was impressed to find the DVD (and a colelctors edition too) out so soon.
Unlike some people (George, you know we're talking about you). Or Disney's Eisner, who thinks anyone with a burner is a thief.
I suggested this before in a previous post, but it was buried in a discussion, but I think it would really be worth trying...
You might have wanted to read the following post, where I realize my typing mistake and actually finish my thought. Reading before criticizing would have been helpful.
I shouldn't complain - I should have previewed!
"The Dutch and the Japanese routiely dance around this world record. I've been around for 3 of these so far and within 6 months a Japanese expert (also with students and volunteers)"...will beat us with a a hundred thousand more. Then we go again.
Looks like there are more questions than answers in the post (as usual):
What: (we got this) Who: Domino expert Robin Weijers and his crew (hundreds of sturdents and volunteers) When: yesterday Where: Leewarden, the Netherlands (not Germany) Why: To beat the Japanese, of course!
The Dutch and the Japanese routiely dance around this world record. I've been around for 3 of these so far and within 6 months a Japanese expert (also with students and volunteers).
The only difference: They have domino robots. We have windmills. Well, usually - I actually went out last night so I missed it...
I'm transplanted from Denver to Hilversum, 1/2 hour south of Amsterdam, and here's the scoop - you're better off grabbing a cheap fare to the US than buying it here.
Buy an iBook with a combo drive and you're set back 1783 Euros. Worse than that, you get into all the Internation English issues with software upgrades and you get a funky keyboard (half-sized left shift key and a misplaced tilde key - fortunately not as bad a thing as a french keyboard though...)
Now - head over to NY for a weekend holiday, have MacWarehouse ship you the same box with out tax and probably something free too, for likely under $1300. Average holiday covers part of the costs of the purchase. Then you can go nuts accessory-shopping at J&R, Tekserve and CompUSA. (I got a nifty firewire case for a loose laptop drive = $60. It's 3-times that in Holland!
If you can find it.
Basically - you're screwed for taxes here. You'll also have to convince the happy people at the airport to not tax you 35% when you re-enter the country too, but there are ways around that (ship the packing and boxes over, then wander towards past the customs people looking like a lost American tourist on vacation...it works!)
Apple's have universal power adaptors and worldwide warranties on the laptops, so if you have vacation days and cash to spend, do it in New York!
- Jim
If you're American goin' into the bathroom and American comin' outta that bathroom, what are you when you're in it? Yoor-o-pee'n! - spiffy quotes 'r' us
Typical/. - no-one reads the frikkin' article or even checks to see if it's accurate . This is absolute bullpuckey! (Thanks Harry!)
The Wired article was there to yank the usual short-hairs out there, get a scream and do the usual Dvorak run-away (did you notice that in the article they actually pointed out that Apple is NOT discouraging development? They're not encouring it either, but they've NEVER really done that!
Kalidiscope, Gregs' (stuff), et al were pretty littly widgity holes in the memory map that caused your Mac to go bye-bye. People here bitch continuously about how pretty OS X is (and that's bad) and now they bitch that Apple doesn't actively support that. Duh - get some ritalin and choose a freakin' side already!
Look at the photos in the Wired article - the candy that they display is almost all available in OS X: Drag Thing (now with tabs - way cooler) Audion. The missing apple menus? ASM. The changable fonts? Candybar from Panic. Shit - I can even run Open GL screen savers on my DESKTOP.
And the Mac doesn't crash - it may run REALLY slowly with that open GL shit sucking cycles, but it keeps on running. And serving. And sharing. Chug chug chug...
Less customizable? More customizable./. community cluelessness? More, definately more...
I thank you for you kind reply. But the reason I did pick Photoshop is because it runs on both Mac and Windows. I can't for the life of me understand what it is about the Macintosh Photoshop that facilitates better design than the Windows Photoshop! It's the same damn thing!
First, Photoshop originated on the Mac (anyone want to do a Google search on Thomas Knoll?) and that may account for your second question - it's not the software, but the users that sit in front of it.The Mac UI was honed by satisfying those early users, and it's paid off in loyalty and efficiency...
Agreed - my Nomad is history too and has been replaced by a 10GB iPod (ooooh! 20GB? I should have waited a month!). The size and weight are the key issues - I have to occasionally find the pod in my clothing (certainly not something I could say for the Nomad). Size matters. I also prefer the playlist and eq features of the iPod (but then again I run mostly on OS X now, with my only SuSEs being a pair of Sun 5s in the corner of the house...
Choose your battles - compatibility or economies of scale. Do you want DVDs to play on DVD players (and not just PCs)? Obvioulsy not...
The Pioneer drives shipped with the Macs, for instance, support erasing and re-writing with the same DVD-R media. Check the history at Macintouch or MacFixIt for corroboration if you need to, but this is my point - the Pioneer format seems to go a long way to make compatibility the primary point.
Your logic is somewhat goofy, especially since you've not research the technology well. BUt hey - still form an opinion...it's what makes./ spin!
DVD+R is NOT as compatible as DVD-R - many independant hardware reviewsproves this. The problem isn't the reflectivity of the disk (often more a compnent of cheap disks) but the dual indexes in the DVD+R format.
It isn't fud - it's review after review showing otherwise. It's also big companies pushing something down our throats that just isn't true, and believe it or not, we're all getting smarter at discovering this...
..and finally the format wars won't be the deciding factor - millions of DVD players already in homes have decided it for us.
DVD-R plays in nearly all players except for some first-gen Toshibas, while DVD+RW *still* aren't compatible with most brands. If you buy a DVD recorder to make movies for demo disks, portfolios or other transmittabes, or just to send to family and friends (or Sundance), then DVD-R is your pal. And the pal of everyone you send a DVD to.
If you're only using it on your PC for backup, who cares?
"Someone needs to hit the people in charge of the RIAA with a clue-bat several times..."
Which makes me wonder, "Where have all the good assasins gone?"
Maybe we have the foundation of our revolt...
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 1
This is off topic, and will possibly be modded-down a bit, but I can't get into this horserace on movies... this is a game for Hollywood politicos...remember them? An article or two back, they were the enemy...
Perhaps it because, as an American now living in Europe (where everything comes out 2-4 months later for tax reasons), I'm just not excited to rush out to the latest movie, and so I feel a little like a strange outsider looking in, watching the addicts both loathe and celebrate their pushers in nearly the same breath. Lemme 'splain...
We bitch about the MPAA here. All the time. We complain about the absolute power they seem to wield and their easy access to politicians. I think, on a/. scale, they may be near "Bill Gates"-level on the Evilmeter.
But their powerbase is far weaker, and their level of integration is social, not technological. We don't need to use their products to do our jobs, unlike Microsoft (well, most of us). And it only takes a few expensive flops to knock a studio boss out of his chair.
We dislike being dictated to (Pick a discussion on...censorship or MPAA involvement) - told what and when to watch something (hijacking video on Tivo) - and how much right we have to things that we purchase (current discussions on MPAA intervention in technology, dissolution of the Sony precendent and other "analog" issues, all our hardware being ID'd with new circuitry) or how we choose to watch it (Divx on Linux, CDs and movies on PCs,
There are a raft of issue we have with the MPAA, yet we support their products without a second thought, as if our choosing to see "Spiderman" over "Attack of the Clones" makes us smarter or better people.
It doesn't...I believe that it makes us look like gullible and leadable fools in Hollywood's eyes. Rant all we want, we'll just come back and power the movie machine that wants to marginalize our rights. (I'm still an American and vote..and pay taxes!...so I can say that with a straight face).
Which begs the obvious question - Why don't we use the power we have to boycott expensive or popular movies to make our "force" felt?
Why don't we, as a community with considerable reach, target new releases and then, on the opening weekend, don't go. No 117-million dollar weekends. No crowing from that one side of Jack Valenti's face (a little like Two-Face, this man looks to me).
We can still go to the movie--that's no problem. 2...3 weeks later maybe. The gains will be slower, and the film community would feel it...that's for sure. But think of the power... we can "cost" them millions a movie by targeting them deliberately as a form of protest.
Actually, it's the ideal form of protest for them. It's all voluntary commerce. And voluntary revolt.
Let's say some Senator pushes a bill to eliminate standard VCRs for ones with digital coding, an ID system, for example. We should create a protest, target a new film coming out, announce that we'll not attend and then see what happends. Can you imagine the reaction to the next "Matrix" movie opening to a 30-million-dollar weekend?
We do have voice that can be easily heard. We just have to keep our sight clear on the target and push until we get there.
If anyone wants to do this, count on my help for any website...I think it needs discussion an focus before doing, but I think we need to consider SOME kind of constructive reaction to the MPAA.
And frankly, the last thing we need to do is Monday-morning analysis on the weekend tallies...
> In Jameson's office, during the scene where he first hears about > Spiderman, he has two T.V.'s behind him...After the amazing Channel > change you see the channel 7 news (discernible by the small blue 7 in > the corner), also in L.A.
Not to deny the deftness of the post (it is good, but it requires a SPOILERS line atop) but there is also a Channel 7 with a circular logo in New York. I used to live in that area and when I go to LA, I always confuse the two...
;)
Wish I lived there now! I have no idea when Spiderman opens here in the Netherlands...
Ah - then I stand corrected.
But then again, we've since seen that the tabbed-palettes suit was against the previous incarnations of Macromedia-ware, and not the current MX crop, which don't violate Adobe's patents.
Anyone else wanna sue 'em? Stand up now! Line forms at the left...
With any luck, we're talking about the "return of Newton" (TM - I gots a patent pending!) in at least the recognition engine. I had a 2100 and after a week it knew my handwriting well. I miss that green glob o' fun!
Slashdot Mirror
Trying desperately not to sound like a paranoid ninny, what is the possible reason to allow insane patent actions like this to proceed? What are possible side-effects, proceedural, legal, whatever, when the government allow idiots to patent air?
Someone must be benefiting from all this...
/. columns almost always begin with someone WHINING!
feh!
2 Macs - iBook and G4, installed and updated fine. No preference changes, no networks lost. Nada, Perfecto.
Basic reminder - always to a Fix Permissions in Disk Utility after any big update.
You know it makes sense...
Indeed - thanks! (erm...who's Mike Meyers? What is he...like Canadian or something?)
[/ smirk]
FEMBOTS! Excellent technology - I want the Heather Brooke model!
I just spoke to someone who schools there - they've gotten a bunch of new hardware from Cisco and HP over the weekend and they've supposed to be running nearly twice as fast as before. All of the old junk's been replaced with new SOTA-ware.
Everything seems to have been a grant too! Who needs insurance??!
But I do believe that there is a way to boycott the Entertainment Cartel - it's not the optimal way, but I think it would work:
You can't kill their product because we want their product, but they don't want us to consume - they want a feeding frenzy. they want people around the block, or waiting in the cold in Norway for a month before the opening. They want you act without thinking...unorganized and unprepared, we're there's no resistance.
Don't kill the movies or the machine, kill the PR frenzy.
Here's my suggestion - when the latest and greatest flick comes out, don't go see it for the first week or two. Stay home. See it in the theatres, by all means, but not in the first 2 weeks.
The reason is so the opening weekend grosses don't become the marketing muscle Hollywood needs to drive our mass frenzy.
Instead of 110 Million, what would happen if SpiderMan opened to a 50 million dollar 3-day weekend.
Go in the third week, have fun. But by then the frenzy never comes.
We would need to organize, pick a movie from a studio for a good reason (they're active on some legal front) and then not see it for a few weeks.
Heck - most movies are formulaic crap (like Wild Wild West) so by the 3rd week we'd all know whether it's worth going or not.
I wouldn't go after something like the Two Towers - I'm not sure if you agree with me, but New Line seems to have been quite fair to not rape the marketplace to squeeze out every last penny. I was impressed to find the DVD (and a colelctors edition too) out so soon.
Unlike some people (George, you know we're talking about you). Or Disney's Eisner, who thinks anyone with a burner is a thief.
I suggested this before in a previous post, but it was buried in a discussion, but I think it would really be worth trying...
You might have wanted to read the following post, where I realize my typing mistake and actually finish my thought. Reading before criticizing would have been helpful.
/.
Oh wait - this is
I shouldn't complain - I should have previewed! "The Dutch and the Japanese routiely dance around this world record. I've been around for 3 of these so far and within 6 months a Japanese expert (also with students and volunteers)"...will beat us with a a hundred thousand more. Then we go again.
Looks like there are more questions than answers in the post (as usual):
What: (we got this)
Who: Domino expert Robin Weijers and his crew (hundreds of sturdents and volunteers)
When: yesterday
Where: Leewarden, the Netherlands (not Germany)
Why: To beat the Japanese, of course!
The Dutch and the Japanese routiely dance around this world record. I've been around for 3 of these so far and within 6 months a Japanese expert (also with students and volunteers).
The only difference: They have domino robots. We have windmills. Well, usually - I actually went out last night so I missed it...
Ah...save your cabfare.
I'm transplanted from Denver to Hilversum, 1/2 hour south of Amsterdam, and here's the scoop - you're better off grabbing a cheap fare to the US than buying it here.
Buy an iBook with a combo drive and you're set back 1783 Euros. Worse than that, you get into all the Internation English issues with software upgrades and you get a funky keyboard (half-sized left shift key and a misplaced tilde key - fortunately not as bad a thing as a french keyboard though...)
Now - head over to NY for a weekend holiday, have MacWarehouse ship you the same box with out tax and probably something free too, for likely under $1300. Average holiday covers part of the costs of the purchase. Then you can go nuts accessory-shopping at J&R, Tekserve and CompUSA. (I got a nifty firewire case for a loose laptop drive = $60. It's 3-times that in Holland!
If you can find it.
Basically - you're screwed for taxes here. You'll also have to convince the happy people at the airport to not tax you 35% when you re-enter the country too, but there are ways around that (ship the packing and boxes over, then wander towards past the customs people looking like a lost American tourist on vacation...it works!)
Apple's have universal power adaptors and worldwide warranties on the laptops, so if you have vacation days and cash to spend, do it in New York!
- Jim
If you're American goin' into the bathroom and American comin' outta that bathroom, what are you when you're in it? Yoor-o-pee'n!
- spiffy quotes 'r' us
Duh. That's all you deserve
134K/sec in Holland...ooooh! The fisihes in the sea are frying from the heat of the cable, I betcha...
Wouldn't get it because it violates basic laws - the second law of the Universe: "the more you put things together, the more they fall apart".
I prefer smaller cameras and small-but-functional laptops. This rates a "beh!"
Typical /. - no-one reads the frikkin' article or even checks to see if it's accurate . This is absolute bullpuckey! (Thanks Harry!)
/. community cluelessness? More, definately more...
The Wired article was there to yank the usual short-hairs out there, get a scream and do the usual Dvorak run-away (did you notice that in the article they actually pointed out that Apple is NOT discouraging development? They're not encouring it either, but they've NEVER really done that!
Kalidiscope, Gregs' (stuff), et al were pretty littly widgity holes in the memory map that caused your Mac to go bye-bye. People here bitch continuously about how pretty OS X is (and that's bad) and now they bitch that Apple doesn't actively support that. Duh - get some ritalin and choose a freakin' side already!
Look at the photos in the Wired article - the candy that they display is almost all available in OS X: Drag Thing (now with tabs - way cooler) Audion. The missing apple menus? ASM. The changable fonts? Candybar from Panic. Shit - I can even run Open GL screen savers on my DESKTOP.
And the Mac doesn't crash - it may run REALLY slowly with that open GL shit sucking cycles, but it keeps on running. And serving. And sharing. Chug chug chug...
Less customizable? More customizable.
Windows has been doing this through the GDI since Windows 3.
Read before posting, eh? 2D - 3D - what's the diff? :)
First, Photoshop originated on the Mac (anyone want to do a Google search on Thomas Knoll?) and that may account for your second question - it's not the software, but the users that sit in front of it.The Mac UI was honed by satisfying those early users, and it's paid off in loyalty and efficiency...
Agreed - my Nomad is history too and has been replaced by a 10GB iPod (ooooh! 20GB? I should have waited a month!). The size and weight are the key issues - I have to occasionally find the pod in my clothing (certainly not something I could say for the Nomad). Size matters. I also prefer the playlist and eq features of the iPod (but then again I run mostly on OS X now, with my only SuSEs being a pair of Sun 5s in the corner of the house...
Choose your battles - compatibility or economies of scale. Do you want DVDs to play on DVD players (and not just PCs)? Obvioulsy not... The Pioneer drives shipped with the Macs, for instance, support erasing and re-writing with the same DVD-R media. Check the history at Macintouch or MacFixIt for corroboration if you need to, but this is my point - the Pioneer format seems to go a long way to make compatibility the primary point. Your logic is somewhat goofy, especially since you've not research the technology well. BUt hey - still form an opinion...it's what makes ./ spin!
DVD+R is NOT as compatible as DVD-R - many independant hardware reviewsproves this. The problem isn't the reflectivity of the disk (often more a compnent of cheap disks) but the dual indexes in the DVD+R format. It isn't fud - it's review after review showing otherwise. It's also big companies pushing something down our throats that just isn't true, and believe it or not, we're all getting smarter at discovering this...
..and finally the format wars won't be the deciding factor - millions of DVD players already in homes have decided it for us.
DVD-R plays in nearly all players except for some first-gen Toshibas, while DVD+RW *still* aren't compatible with most brands. If you buy a DVD recorder to make movies for demo disks, portfolios or other transmittabes, or just to send to family and friends (or Sundance), then DVD-R is your pal. And the pal of everyone you send a DVD to.
If you're only using it on your PC for backup, who cares?
"Someone needs to hit the people in charge of the RIAA with a clue-bat several times..." Which makes me wonder, "Where have all the good assasins gone?"
This is off topic, and will possibly be modded-down a bit, but I can't get into this horserace on movies... this is a game for Hollywood politicos...remember them? An article or two back, they were the enemy...
/. scale, they may be near "Bill Gates"-level on the Evilmeter.
Perhaps it because, as an American now living in Europe (where everything comes out 2-4 months later for tax reasons), I'm just not excited to rush out to the latest movie, and so I feel a little like a strange outsider looking in, watching the addicts both loathe and celebrate their pushers in nearly the same breath. Lemme 'splain...
We bitch about the MPAA here. All the time. We complain about the absolute power they seem to wield and their easy access to politicians. I think, on a
But their powerbase is far weaker, and their level of integration is social, not technological. We don't need to use their products to do our jobs, unlike Microsoft (well, most of us). And it only takes a few expensive flops to knock a studio boss out of his chair.
We dislike being dictated to (Pick a discussion on...censorship or MPAA involvement) - told what and when to watch something (hijacking video on Tivo) - and how much right we have to things that we purchase (current discussions on MPAA intervention in technology, dissolution of the Sony precendent and other "analog" issues, all our hardware being ID'd with new circuitry) or how we choose to watch it (Divx on Linux, CDs and movies on PCs,
There are a raft of issue we have with the MPAA, yet we support their products without a second thought, as if our choosing to see "Spiderman" over "Attack of the Clones" makes us smarter or better people.
It doesn't...I believe that it makes us look like gullible and leadable fools in Hollywood's eyes. Rant all we want, we'll just come back and power the movie machine that wants to marginalize our rights. (I'm still an American and vote..and pay taxes!...so I can say that with a straight face).
Which begs the obvious question - Why don't we use the power we have to boycott expensive or popular movies to make our "force" felt?
Why don't we, as a community with considerable reach, target new releases and then, on the opening weekend, don't go. No 117-million dollar weekends. No crowing from that one side of Jack Valenti's face (a little like Two-Face, this man looks to me).
We can still go to the movie--that's no problem. 2...3 weeks later maybe. The gains will be slower, and the film community would feel it...that's for sure. But think of the power... we can "cost" them millions a movie by targeting them deliberately as a form of protest.
Actually, it's the ideal form of protest for them. It's all voluntary commerce. And voluntary revolt.
Let's say some Senator pushes a bill to eliminate standard VCRs for ones with digital coding, an ID system, for example. We should create a protest, target a new film coming out, announce that we'll not attend and then see what happends. Can you imagine the reaction to the next "Matrix" movie opening to a 30-million-dollar weekend?
We do have voice that can be easily heard. We just have to keep our sight clear on the target and push until we get there.
If anyone wants to do this, count on my help for any website...I think it needs discussion an focus before doing, but I think we need to consider SOME kind of constructive reaction to the MPAA.
And frankly, the last thing we need to do is Monday-morning analysis on the weekend tallies...
> In Jameson's office, during the scene where he first hears about
> Spiderman, he has two T.V.'s behind him...After the amazing Channel
> change you see the channel 7 news (discernible by the small blue 7 in
> the corner), also in L.A.
Not to deny the deftness of the post (it is good, but it requires a SPOILERS line atop) but there is also a Channel 7 with a circular logo in New York. I used to live in that area and when I go to LA, I always confuse the two...
;)
Wish I lived there now! I have no idea when Spiderman opens here in the Netherlands...
Anyone else wanna sue 'em? Stand up now! Line forms at the left...
With any luck, we're talking about the "return of Newton" (TM - I gots a patent pending!) in at least the recognition engine. I had a 2100 and after a week it knew my handwriting well. I miss that green glob o' fun!